Squidlog.net

The Real Drifter

My heart is pounding. Palms are sweating. Hair is frazzled. No, I didn’t just wrestle my eight hundred pound bike around some wicked ‘twisties’. What I did was look at the calendar. Egads!

I have seventy-three days to create eighteen lenses. Don’t get your calculator out, that’s one lens about every four days. Oh yeah, I also have to make sure all the others are up to snuff as well. If I can swing the June 30 deadline, I’ll be able to wear the Squidoo Giant badge with pride.

Having a self imposed deadline has transformed my thinking. I will not violate my own personal standards on what I think are quality lenses, but I’m now looking at shortening up my creations. Cutting to the chase, this means I have to sell what I’m cooking in shorter recipes without diluting my craft. Can I do that? At this point it is not a matter of I can, because I will.

You may ask why is my heart pounding, my palms sweaty, and my hair frazzled if I am confident that I’ll make it? There is still that glimmer of hopeless fear when I work under a deadline. Every minute I spend looking for data I cannot find, or stumbling over a word, or maybe discarding a graphic I spent some time on could be the first minute of days without clear thought where to go next.

That fear and my horrible typing are my banes as a wannabe writer. I have to work on the spark, the emotion of the current thought. If I stumble away from what I am writing, it is dang hard for me to get that river flowing in the right direction again. So, I push myself.

When I get to June 30 and I’m happy with that journey, I’ll have two huge thanks to give. One is the awesome cheering thread in the So You Want To Be A Giant Squid discussion area at the SuidU Forum. That thread is my resource for motivation as I watch talented lensmasters that started Squidooing well after I did catch up and pass me. This is not depressing to me, no it is charging me. I will not be left behind.

The other help is coming from my Twitter pals. Sure, I have reaped a lens idea or two from the chatter, but more than that they are helping me keep my focus on who I am. Keeping me grounded, and that is the real quality in my lens art. My voice through the written word is all that really matters and my pals are helping me keep it real.

At the moment, I’m kind of stuck and it is starting to rain; so I can’t ride this one out. I think I’ll comb my hair, wipe off my palms and grab a beer.
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Tracey_M came on the scene in November 2008 and almost immediately set herself the challenge of becoming a Giant Squid. Documentation of her journey can be found at her “Potential Giant Squid Challenge” Diary. Did she make enough lenses to become a Giant Squid at the next round up? No. But, she kept at it and is now probably one of the front-runners for Giant Squid status this go ’round. Even more remarkable? The actual lenses. Her work is unique, interesting, fun, and educational. Plus, this lady has an excellent eye for design — she definitely has Photoshop’s number! Check out Lens Candy; she created this early on as a very generous gift for her fellow Squidizens.

Tracy_M Quote: Children suffered awful atrocities during the Middle Ages. Unwanted babies were often ‘exposed’, left naked on large open wastedlands to die of exposure. —The Invention of Childhood — A Brief History

Image by carianoff★™ — adapted under Creative Commons License Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

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